Spam Karma 2 + Akismet

First, a bit of history. I have been using the anti-spam plugin Spam Karma 2 on my blog for months. It’s quite an excellent piece of work. It uses a ton of different methods to determine if a comment is spam including the age of the post, a Javascript payload (most spam bots don’t support Javascript), URL blacklists, comparison to other spam comments by the same person, etc. All of those result in a very low error rate and next to no spam actually making it onto my blog.

Anyway, I decided to try out recently the only other player worth mentioning in the WordPress anti-spam field, Akismet. Rather than trying to figure out if a comment is spam by doing a bunch of tests on your blog’s end, it sends the comment’s contents off to Akismet’s servers and it compares it to the huge database that it has.

Now of course this has it’s pros and cons. The pros are that it’s always up to the second on spam as it uses other blogs to compare with. However, it doesn’t do the Javascript tests or compare it to other spam on your blog. And in the end, I found it to be reliable, but not quite as much so as SK2. Which is why I switched back.

However, the other day I ran across an excellent little plugin for SK2 that uses the Akismet servers as an additional resource for evaluating the comment’s karma. So, now I have the best of both worlds!

There is one other significant disadvantage of the Akismet plugin that ultimatly keeps me away from installing it: It sends the comments to a central server. Yes, that’s how it works but I do have secret posts and don’t even want to spread the comments to that to a location I can not control. Anyway, for the most users this isn’t important, I just wanted to mention this.